Posted
by
BeauHDon Friday December 30, 2016 @11:30PM
from the how-it-came-to-be dept.

Lasrick quotes a report from The New York Times (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternate source): For more than three years, rather than rely on military officers working out of isolated bunkers, Russian government recruiters have scouted a wide range of programmers, placing prominent ads on social media sites, offering jobs to college students and professional coders, and even speaking openly about looking in Russia's criminal underworld for potential talent. From the New York Post: "Russia's Defense Ministry bought advertising on Vkontakta, the country's most popular social media site, to lure those who were more talented with a keyboard than an AK-47 rifle. 'If you graduated from college, if you are a technical specialist, if you are ready to use your knowledge, we give you an opportunity,' the ad promised, according to the Times. The ad went on to assure recruits that they would be part of units called science squadrons based at military installations where they would live in 'comfortable accommodation' and showed an apartment outfitted with a washing machine, the Times reported. The Defense Ministry even dangled the chance to dodge Russia's mandatory draft by allowing university students to join a science squadron instead and then questioned them about their proficiency with programming languages, the report said."

to lure those who were more talented with a keyboard than an AK-47 rifle

Sigh... The Russian military doesn't use AK-47 rifles anymore, and haven't for a very long time.

Anyhow, next I'm sure we'll see the story of Russians hacking the electrical grid as part of our coordinated "Russian hacking themed" stories. I just got one more of those stories on a local news site, telling us because of the Russian hacking, we'll soon be forced to change our passwords regularly and use funny characters in them, and stop reusing passwords in order to stay secure. Ho

Hey guys, did you hear Russia is hacking the US? "No big deal, it's probably just propaganda" Hey guys, did you hear Hillary didn't secure her e-mail server? "OMG SHE'S THE DEVIL SEND HER TO PRISON FOR TREASON!" I love watching you morons try to justify your way out of your own stupidity.

I don't know how much of the Russian hacking scandal is valid and how much is PR (propaganda).

But PR does not care about truth or falsehood, it will use anything. The last large analysis of a campaign that I know of isfrom the Iraq war. You can find the report here: http://www.sourcewatch.org/ind... [sourcewatch.org]Note the extent of the organisation, how many people and resources are involved. It's yuge. And the variation in types of stories. There can be speculation, fear mongering(which does not require lying, you just worry about possibilities), claims, plain false stories. It's a great analysis.These people haven't been sitting on their asses since then.In this case there's a campaign to ruin the relation with Russia and make it very hard for Trump to mend that(only russian stooges want better relations with russia).And to take away the focus from the content of the leaks, which were uh about what again?With fake news there is little or no build up. It's just rumors made up of thin air. That's amateurish and low budget.Real campaigns work on many fronts at once. Once you have official sources and favored journalists channelling anonymous sources you're instantly playing on another level.In this case the trumped up charges are that the Russians made sure Trump was elected by hacking Podesta and DNC computers and passing them to wikileaks.With a good campaign every reasonable person should start to doubt and think there must be really something to it.

Wikileaks say (reluctantly) that they got their data from the inside, not through hacking and not through the russians.

Suppose there's a hack. The reaction to is a choice. You can choose to minimize it. You can choose to respond in kind. Usually secret agencies would fight this out quietly. You can choose to take the opportunity to escalate the tensions as much as possible. That is clear intent.

Well..it's still too much caricature. Who says the 'heir' of the Office of Strategic Influence is involved here? PR is available to many, to the extent that there's hardly any central player who can maintain a clear view, and the gullible who play along usually have their own interest in mind. In this case there are a lot of official sources though.

I don't know if I would call it fake, but I wouldn't call it news. I have no reason not to believe that the NSA and other government agencies recruit top talent in important fields from college, and I would expect agencies from other countries to recruit top talent in important fields from their colleges.

> I have no reason not to believe that the NSA and other government agencies recruit top talent in important fields from college,

I know they post employment ads just like any other organization who hires people. I would expect they recruit like other organizations - though possibly not as effectively as many companies. I'm in the security field and have been called about jobs for a lot of companies, only one of which sounded like potentially a front company.

I have no reason not to believe that the NSA and other government agencies recruit top talent in important fields from college, and I would expect agencies from other countries to recruit top talent in important fields from their colleges.

They certainly try, but there remain a number of factors in the Russian society that make the recruitment offer in Russia more attractive to Russian graduates than similar offers are to American or European graduates:

1. Military service is still mandatory in Russia, even for college graduates. I know this because several teaching assistants in my computer science classes here in the United States were from Russia and told me that a major attraction of studying abroad as graduate students was the opportunity to defer or avoid the mandatory military service back home. In the United States, military service has not been mandatory since the late 1970s and the jobs available to computer science and other STEM graduates are generally much more attractive than anything on offer from the US government or the military. Some of the European countries still have mandatory military service, but European armed forces are generally small and poorly funded which makes them less able and willing to make attractive offers to high skill graduates. So, a chance to satisfy the mandatory service requirement in relative comfort and with higher pay has the potential to be very attractive to a Russian graduate in Russia.

2. The private sector in Russia is nothing like what it is here in the United States or Europe. The opportunities are much poorer and therefore less attractive compared with a government position. Especially one that provides benefits that are hard to get and expensive in Russia, particularly for young people, like decent and affordable housing in and around the Moscow area.

3. The sorts of skills that one learns hacking on behalf of the Russian government are not the sort of things that one can easily learn in school or working for a legitimate American or European business. These skills can be lucrative in the criminal networks and Russia has generally shown a willingness to give the United States and Europe the middle finger when it comes to cooperation in law enforcement among other things. This makes hacking for a living, mostly with impunity, a much more viable career path in Russia than it is in the more law abiding countries of Europe or especially here in the United States where not only is hacking frowned upon, but as Aaron Swartz discovered, severely punished.

Heh, that reminds me of a survey where they asked graduating Russian high school students about intended careers (apparently the survey is taken every year). At some point, to some surprise, one of the top scoring careers was "policeman". It turned out that a cop's training and networking opportunities were seen as an excellent preparation for an entry into organized crime.

I don't know if I would call it fake, but I wouldn't call it news. I have no reason not to believe that the NSA and other government agencies recruit top talent in important fields from college, and I would expect agencies from other countries to recruit top talent in important fields from their colleges.

The NSA, FBI, and other government agencies have been complaining that the revelations of their recent past misdeeds has damaged their ability to recruit the talent needed for computer security. Various government requirements do not help.

Simple: Publishing it during the OPM breach would have harmed Obama, whom the New York Times and it's employees almost universally adore, while publishing it now helps prop up the false narrative [theintercept.com] that the Russians were behind the DNC leaks, not a disgruntled Democ [washingtontimes.com]

A country that regularly invades other country to force a change in government gets its panties in a twist over a theory that someone might have taken an interest in their election. The US does this all the time.

A country that regularly invades other country to force a change in government gets its panties in a twist over a theory that someone might have taken an interest in their election. The US does this all the time.

That's just not true. More often than not, there's no invasion, instead of group of puppet opponents are trained and funded by the USA. Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Argentina, Chile, Zaire/Congo, Cuba, Colombia, Panama, El Salvador, Ghana, Haiti, Honduras, Uruguay, Guatemala. Probably many others.

I for one never imaged I'd live to see another red scare come out of a bunch of bhutt hurt liberal media shills. But then again I never thought I'd see the DNC get so low that they'd allow the most corrupt politician in American history be their front runner either.

Honestly I don't know how you liberals sleep with yourselves at night. Just forget about Trump for a moment. Look at how bad the DNC has come apart thanks to this election. How many times they they have to complete restaff the committee becau

The point is that the Russians did a lot of things, including cyber attacks, that would have been worth all these steps at least the last 4 years, but the Obama administration tolerated it. It only became intolerable when the target of the attacks was the candidate who promised to keep Obama's legacy in place. So excuse us for not being so 'patriotic'

So the battle they picked was not when the private records of US citizens were stolen by hackers, or any of the other instances, but when the emails of DNC officials were hacked and leaked to the American public? Yeah, good prioritization

This was not anything like a Watergate break-in, since neither Trump nor the RNC did it: a third party, that had an animus towards Obama and Clinton, and which GOP administrations in the past as well as the GOP establishment openly condemn, did. And the only 'damage' wa

I didn't realize that the CIA and FBI were now "bhutt hurt liberal media shills", thanks for clarifying that.

I honestly don't know how conservatives sleep at night, knowing that their system failed badly enough to put Trump in the White House (too many candidates spreading their support too thin, failing to counter his bullshit effectively)... I guess they are just happy that they can now ram through all their policies and are willing to overlook the rest of it.

Well, I am not sure about the CIA, but the FBI was doing their job. While the FBI is about investigating national crimes, the CIA has a little different agenda.

I don't know how liberal progressives can sleep at night when the system allowed someone to even run for the highest office of the nation with the questionable history of their candidate. Granted, the conservatives could very well employ some of the same tactics, they even tried to sabotage his chances to win the candidacy . Some of the conserva

I didn't realize that the CIA and FBI were now "bhutt hurt liberal media shills", thanks for clarifying that.

I honestly don't know how conservatives sleep at night, knowing that their system failed badly enough to put Trump in the White House (too many candidates spreading their support too thin, failing to counter his bullshit effectively)... I guess they are just happy that they can now ram through all their policies and are willing to overlook the rest of it.

They must be terrified over what Russian has on the GOP though. You can bet that if Putin's man in the White House ever goes rogue there will be some strategic leaks to neuter him.

What could be worse than a video clip of "...you can grab 'em by the pussy"?

I didn't realize that the CIA and FBI were now "bhutt hurt liberal media shills", thanks for clarifying that.

I honestly don't know how conservatives sleep at night, knowing that their system failed badly enough to put Trump in the White House (too many candidates spreading their support too thin, failing to counter his bullshit effectively)... I guess they are just happy that they can now ram through all their policies and are willing to overlook the rest of it.

They must be terrified over what Russian has on the GOP though. You can bet that if Putin's man in the White House ever goes rogue there will be some strategic leaks to neuter him.

Define 'Conservatives' here. Are you talking about the average citizen in Red States who support Republicans election after election, only to be disappointed later? Or are you talking about the talking heads in National Review, Weekly Standard or the American Federalist? If it's the latter, they opposed Trump right uptil the end, until he won the election: after that, they accepted the election results and decided to support him. If it is the former, they overwhelmingly supported Trump in the primaries

Excepting that if this was manufactured information, no break-ins would have been needed - or maybe one. Steal whatever info you need about certain computer information, like headers, and then generate emails w/ all sorts of details that would make candidates squirm. Only that if they had done that, it would have been very vociferously denied, instead of the battle cry of 'It was the evil Putin trying to get his puppet Trump elected'.

The Trump tax returns are the favorite straw man of not just Liberals,

A country that regularly invades other country to force a change in government gets its panties in a twist over a theory that someone might have taken an interest in their election. The US does this all the time.

Are you seriously pointing at the USA's habit of invading other countries in an attempt to make Russia look like an Boy Scout? Russia has it's own record of invading other countries, installing puppet governments, committing atrocities and imposing a regime of oppression that makes the Americans look like rank amateurs. Just ask the nations of Eastern Europe how much they enjoyed half a century of Russian imposed communism and how much they are looking forward to enjoying a repeat of that experience if Putin succeeds in disassembling NATO and rebuilding the Soviet empire. If I have to choose between living under US Imperial hegemony or Russian kleptocratic tyranny I'll choose the Americans every damn time, even when they, are dumb enough to elect a narcissistic moron with a bad orange comb over and an over active Twitter account who seems to be hell bent on provoking a trade war with China.

A country that regularly invades other country to force a change in government gets its panties in a twist over a theory that someone might have taken an interest in their election. The US does this all the time.

So that's OK, then? I think it is poor thinking to base your moral judgement on what others do, but that's perhaps beside the point. Yes, we all do it, and somewhere it is morally wrongto some extent, but the question here is: Should we worry about it? And I think the answer is yes - not because this is Russia, the old enemy, but because cyber attacks are increasingly dangerous to modern, industrialised nations. In the past we mostly had to worry about he US being a potential threat to the stability of the

One more, this time is Russia, not invasion but "influence/interference" other country's election:Time 1996 [time.com]: Yanks to the rescue. The secret story of how American advisers helped Yeltsin win

In the end the Russian people chose--and chose decisively--to reject the past. Voting in the final round of the presidential election last week, they preferred Boris Yeltsin to his Communist rival Gennadi Zyuganov by a margin of 13 percentage points. He is far from the ideal democrat or reformer, and his lieutenants Victor Chernomyrdin and Alexander Lebed are already squabbling over power, but Yeltsin is arguably the best hope Russia has for moving toward pluralism and an open economy. By re-electing him, the Russians defied predictions that they might willingly resubmit themselves to communist rule.

The outcome was by no means inevitable. Last winter Yeltsin's approval ratings were in the single digits. There are many reasons for his change in fortune, but a crucial one has remained a secret. For four months, a group of American political consultants clandestinely participated in guiding Yeltsin's campaign. Here is the inside story of how these advisers helped Yeltsin achieve the victory that will keep reform in Russia alive.

Focus on the bold texts, how nice the good guys Time preferred to describe, compare to:

Time 2016 [freebook11.com]: Russia Wants to Undermine Faith in the US Election Don't Fall for It

Since the spring, U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement agencies have seen mounting evidence of an active Russian influence operation targeting the 2016 presidential election...., undermining faith in the result and in democracy itself.......
Russia’s interference in the U.S. election is an extraordinary escalation of an already worrying trend.......
in Trump, Putin has found an almost perfect, if unwitting, ally for his influence operation.

US reporting of events in Russia is almost always biased and uninformed. It's extremely rare to find reporting from a Russian viewpoint, because there are so many unspoken differences in the way we see things. A strong, powerful head of state is automatically viewed as a negative in the US, for example.

Actually, it was done twice by 2 US presidents - Clinton and Obama. Both did what they could to try and get Netanyahu beaten in the Israeli elections - w/ Clinton sending Carville to manage Labour's campaign and actually pulling it off - getting Ehud Barak elected

While I don't believe that the WikiLeaks was the straw that broke the camel's back and tilted this election Trump's way, in the event that it actually did, it couldn't have happened to a more deserving candidate

Actually, it was done twice by 2 US presidents - Clinton and Obama. Both did what they could to try and get Netanyahu beaten in the Israeli elections - w/ Clinton sending Carville to manage Labour's campaign and actually pulling it off - getting Ehud Barak elected

While I don't believe that the WikiLeaks was the straw that broke the camel's back and tilted this election Trump's way, in the event that it actually did, it couldn't have happened to a more deserving candidate

So Trump was elected to give Hillary her just desserts? That's like setting yourself on fire to show the propane company you don't need their fuel to keep warm in the winter.

This country deserves every fucking thing coming to it over the next four years.

No, I stated that the Democrats deserved what they got. They tried rigging Israeli elections twice - the first time successfully - and this time, assuming that this election was rigged against them (something I don't agree that happened), it was a just payback.

Oh, I absolutely consider them legit. I was just accepting the (incorrect) premise that it was illegitimate to sabotage their prospects, and then illustrating that they had done it for at least one foreign election previously - that in Israel. So it's like someone in a very fragile glass house throwing stones

First of all, Mr Knowitall, Israel has a government similar to UK - where the Prime Minister heads the government, not a president.

Second, I mentioned 'deserving candidate', not 'deceiving candidate'. What's wrong w/ you - did you learn reading in a school in a shitty school district?

Third, I never said it would be satisfying if Putin put Trump in power. What I said was that having tried their best to interfere in the Israeli elections, for the US to blame Russia for doing the same here is a case of p

I never made any assumptions about you and the other AC. I knew you were different, and the above post was directed at you and you alone. Reading comprehension ain't your strongest point, and you illustrate it pretty emphatically.

About Israel, in 1999 or thereabouts, Bill Clinton did send James Carville to Israel to manage the campaign to oust Netanyahu, since he thought that Israel was the party that blocked peace. Except that he found out otherwise when Arafat rebuffed the most generous - and suicida

A country that regularly invades other country to force a change in government gets its panties in a twist over a theory that someone might have taken an interest in their election.

Correction. President Obama and his fellow sore losers in the Democratic Party got their collective panties in a twist because they lost to Donald Trump. As an American it doesn't surprise me at all that Russia wants to meddle in our affairs. We need a much tougher man in the White House and it's my hope that Trump will be that tougher man. Obama always struck me as too fawning and effete to be effective in a world inhabited by the likes of Vladimir Putin

Okay, let me get this straight. Your completely ignoring the fact that the result of a national election was dictated by a foreign country in favor of a cheap shot against democrats? Seriously? Is this what passes for patriotism? The election was close. Months of stolen emails did hurt them considerably, and no there was nothing there that might not have been worse from the other side.

Also, you want a tough guy, you know like Trump who appears to be all but ready to molest Putin with how much praise he

"Okay, let me get this straight. Your completely ignoring the fact that the result of a national election was dictated by a foreign country in favor of a cheap shot against democrats?"

WHERE do you get this garbage?

THERE is NO evidence that the result of the election was "dictated by a foreign country"!!!!! Hillary Clinton's campaign idiot, John Podesta, stupidly responded to a phishing e-mail and in doing so handed over the access to his e-mail account to SOME HACKER located SOMEWHERE ON EARTH. Apparent

No truths had to be revealed on the Trump side b'cos.... he revealed them himself. Whether it was buying politicians, or paying the least taxes or taking advantages of tax loopholes.... The thing that frustrated the lamestream media was that Trump would admit everything upfront, which is why to this day, they have their collective cunt in a twist over his tax returns. Never mind that he released a comprehensive financial statement - as required by law - a few days after he announced his candidacy

That's mildly interesting. As is normally the case, the article points out that the headline is bullshit. College students? That's where you find entry-level programmers, not "elite hackers". Nothing wrong with that, of course, you can train an entry-level programmer to damage computing systems just as readily as you can train them to build secure systems.

There are a few elite hackers, people who really understand the low-leveling functioning of the system, who write the payloads in assembler. Those elite ones, who write assembler, tend to be older more often than they are college kids. College kids tend to *use* the tools written by the older, more experienced and "elite" hackers.

There are a few elite hackers, people who really understand the low-leveling functioning of the system, who write the payloads in assembler.

Of course. A piece of code in assembler that gets injected on the system via a clever manipulation of the power phase and/or fan oscillation, delivered via Q-spoiling. Once infected, the host system sends an email to the hacker to let him know which version of Wordpress is running on the server so he can know which php file to upload and pwn the organization.

There are a few elite hackers, people who really understand the low-leveling functioning of the system, who write the payloads in assembler. Those elite ones, who write assembler, tend to be older more often than they are college kids.

I'm not one of those guys, but I've partied with some of those guys (and no, not at defcon) and it seemed to me like plenty of them actually are college kids. Is there something mystical about assembler that prevents college kids from learning it?

In my experience, a few young people can work at low level, assembler etc, and truly grok it but it's much more common for older people to have learned it. On the other hand, the youngest programmers are more likely to know how to use the framework of month, which is also a good thing to know.

Multiply the percentage of people in each age group who grok assembly by the percentage that have elite skills that normally come from many years of experience.

In the old days I learned machine language, then assembler and then basic, all from the bottom up , but that was the seventies. Now on pcs assember is rarely needed and when it's used for performance reasons you can still question whether it's really needed. Hacking is different because you're trying to break things, you don't want to respect the interface and its safeties and errorhandling. On custom hardware though like modems I know assembler is used a lot.

I doing plenty in Assembly for the Bulgarian People's Army in the 80s. There was a time I could read and edit in hexadecimal, getting things right most of the time. After the fall of the so called Communist government, I went to college in the US. Nothing mythical about Assembly and college, they mix just fine.

As a matter of fact, at least in the 90s, MIT had plenty of courses that used Assembly... and a few were you would actually design both a processor (with a very simple instruction set) and write th

Watch some of the CCC talk videos. There are university students hacking commercial banking systems and games consoles for their dissertations. The games consoles in particular need a lot of assembler and low level work to recover keys, right down to the hardware level.

> You will have the programmers to write/modify tools and find new zero-day cracks then you will have the people who use those tools and try to get into systems using defined and developed methods.

Even in the small to medium sized security company where I work, that's at least three, really four different groups. I write the tools. S sometimes the tools I write find basically the same vulnerabilities in new applications (such as yet another SQLi in yet another web application) , but real zero-days is

After submitting, I realized part of my post was probably unclear. Currently, I mostly write tools to find known vulnerabilities. If you didn't install the security patches on patch Tuesday, my tools will discover that. If you're still using an outdated cipher, my tools detect that. Brand new vulnerabilities are a different department located in a different country.

because don't pretend the U.S. has not done this for a decade or more. Russia (and China) has got _nothing_ on the U.S. when it comes to staging a cyberwar on the world, as the NSA revelations have proven. This NYT article is a case of the Fake News you've been hearing about.

The ad went on to assure recruits that they would be part of units called science squadrons based at military installations where they would live in 'comfortable accommodation' and showed an apartment outfitted with a washing machine, the Times reported.

Wait a minute, you mean the President Elect chose to pimp out the US to a country that has to recruit tech talent with the promise of a fucking washing machine? A country that's sitting on untold natural resources but has an economy smaller than that of Spain?

Jesus, Trump should have at least held out for China. We might have actually gotten something out of that deal.

Is Trump's connection with Putin purely sexual, or are there US national security implications?

Money, sex, and power. Putin helped Trump get elected. Power. Putin-Trump puts Rex Tillerson in as Secretary so he can roll back the sanctions blocking the half-trillion dollar oil deal Tillerson had with Putin. Money.

So now we just need the sex part. All jokes of shirtless Putin and Trump nipple tickling him aside, I'm not sure where that plays in yet. Trump and some of his current and former associates have had plenty of dealings in Russia. Wouldn't surprise me in the slightest that someone like Trump has

The NYT served as the Bush Administration's propaganda organ in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. Now they are reprising that role for the Obama administration's last-ditch efforts to lie the country into war with Russia.

And? It's a private organization. Hacking government facilities is far more worthy of official retaliation than hacking of a political party. Especially when the only thing which appears to have been exposed was the misdeeds by the DNC. The whole thing smells like a DNC cover up to blame a scapegoat de jour to distract the country from what Wikileaks actually exposed : system corruption within a party which is known for accusing others of "hypocrisy" whenever those others don't meet their own integrity

And if you still don't think "let's find some Russians to blame" is the modus operandi for handling elections loss in the DNC, just recall this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Chapman

They rounded up some RF nationals who worked in finance (not even in government) and expelled them ON JULY 4th in the year when they were trying to stem the tide of the upcomming losses which were to come from the Tea Party surge in the mid-term elections. Their "espionage" consisted of advising RF government in financial m

Don't you know. Russia spies all descended on Wisconsin and told 300,000 Democratic voters from 2012 to vote elsewhere. Russia personally bumped Stein and Johnson's turnout from 7665 & 20439 to 31072 and 106,674 respectively. Russia told Clinton to not visit Wisconsin once in the general election.

Never you mind those Sanders supporters that said Fuck You to the DNC. (Seriously, how can anyone at DNC HQ say Sanders would have lost Wisconsin or Michigan?).

Republican domination of state houses during the census guaranteed their ability to gerrymander electoral districts to the point where they'll never lose control of the House. Tom DeLay might have served jail time, but he succeeded in utterly destroying any possible US argument that it is still a democracy, and delivered the country into the hands of mouth-breathing racist morons for the foreseeable future.

gerrymandering would serve as an explanation if they didn't win 39 governships. Or if the popular vote victory would be more spread across the country. The won in the California outlier and the fact the Democrats actually lost the popular vote without the California outlier only proves the gerrymandering claim wrong.

Yes, I guess the first thing I should learn is that when you try to pose as an insider, it helps if there is a mechanism to post anonymously, AC. Thanks. That was such a valuable lesson. Too bad calling someone a troll has become so cliche that it's almost trolling in itself. It could have been a very appropriate way to categorize your post.

California would not have tilted the election even if it had 50% more electoral votes than it currently does. I am suggesting that electoral college is a good system for putting a check on cluster fuck or group think or whatever else you want to call it. Obviously, the people in California are woefully misinformed and completely isolated from the opinions outside of those prevalent in that state. Having a place like that have such a huge impact on the rest of the country would be a gross step away from d

Obama, what an asshole. He gladly breaks the tradition of lame ducks not rocking the boat. He antagonizes Israel at the UN and now tries to declare war on Russia. What's next? Invade Ireland to seize Apple's cash, then nuke North Korea?